Workshops
Evidence for Health Policy: How to Use and Interpret Burden of Disease and
Cost-Effectiveness Information
Date: Tuesday 24 November
Time: 9am-12pm
Presented By:
Professor Alan D Lopez, Head, School of Population Health, University of Queensland
Professor Theo Vos, Director, Centre for Burden of Disease and Cost-effectiveness, School of Population Health, University of Queensland
While health budgets rise, the population ages and competing demands from the public and lobby groups for funding of health care abound, health policy-makers are under pressure to justify their decision-making on resource allocation with evidence.
Information on burden of disease and cost-effectiveness are key inputs to evidence-based decision-making on resource allocation. Burden of disease describes the size and distribution of health problems in the population and projections thereof:
• How big are health problems?
• Who gets them?
• Are they changing over time?
Cost-effectiveness analyses provide information on the value for money invested in different health interventions, or combinations of health interventions, that address a particular health problem. Results are often presented as a cost per unit of health gain (QALY or DALY) and mirrored against a commonly used –but unwritten– threshold of $50,000 per QALY/DALY to determine what is and what is not a cost-effective intervention or ’good buy’. Good studies acknowledge there is a lot of uncertainty in cost-effectiveness calculations and there are several ways in which this uncertainty can be presented eg. as a range or in graphs. It does make it more difficult to interpret the findings.
This workshop intends to give you enough insight into how burden of disease and cost-effectiveness results are computed to allow you to interpret findings and to assess the strength of the evidence presented. You will be a presented with a few practical exercises using Excel spreadsheets. It is therefore helpful if you bring a laptop. Rudimentary knowledge of a spreadsheet is all that is needed for these exercises.
Professor Alan Lopez developed the Global Burden of Disease methods with Chris Murray in the early 1990s and remains at the forefront of new developments in the methods.
Professor Theo Vos has the greatest experience in the world in conducting national burden of disease studies and has conducted large scale cost-effectiveness studies under the ACE (Assessing Cost–Effectiveness) banner in Australia and comparable work in Thailand and Vietnam.
Enacting collaborative research: responding more to our patients is more rewarding for health professionals and can reform the system.
Date: Tuesday 24 November
Time: 1-4pm
Presented By:
David GREENFIELD, PhD, Senior Research Fellow
Centre for Clinical Governance Research, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales
d.greenfield@unsw.edu.au
Peter NUGUS, PhD, Research Fellow
Centre for Clinical Governance Research, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales
p.nugus@unsw.edu.au
Jo TRAVAGLIA, MEd, Research Fellow
Centre for Clinical Governance Research, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales
j.travaglia@unsw.edu.au
Judy STONE, MSc, IPL Coordinator
Australian Capital Territory Health
judy.stone@act.gov.au
Paul DUGDALE, MBBS, Director
Centre for Health Stewardship, Australian National University and Australian Capital Territory Health
paul.dugdale@act.gov.au
Beverly HAYHURST, MPHC, Program Officer
Australian Capital Territory Division of General Practice
b.hayhurst@actdgp.asn.au
Susan ABBOTT, BAppSc, Project Officer
Centre for Health Stewardship, Australian National University
susan.abbott@anu.edu.au
Workshop sponsored by:
Enabling health organisations to be more responsive to patients is more rewarding for health professionals and can reform how care is provided. These outcomes are fundamental needs of the health care system and can be achieved by infusing policy development and clinical practice with research activities and findings.
This workshop will examine how stakeholders – project officers, policy analysts, clinicians, managers and researchers – can work collaboratively to achieve these outcomes. The session will offer participants the opportunity to discuss strategies to enact collaborative research in health organisations. The focus will be on how to interlink research activities and findings at team, service and policy levels. Participants will consider how to interlink activities at the three levels to promote more integrated services and ongoing system improvement. A key consideration will also be how to encourage a health care team to enact a patient-centered focus. Together we will identify how to create an integrated collaborative environment for health professionals and researchers, including how to make research findings more accessible and useable.
To explore this issue the workshop will use as an exemplar the experience of enacting an action research project aimed at improving interprofessional learning and interprofessional practice within a health system. The perspectives of different stakeholders will be compared and contrasted; using this project we will explore the complementary roles of project officers, policy analysts, clinicians, managers and researchers.
Changing the culture of health organisations so professionals become more skilled at undertaking or commissioning and utilising research is a challenging but achievable journey. We encourage participants to come and discuss and debate these issues, so that together we might learn from each other and improve the health system.